PRESENTATION: Anish Kapoor-Early Works

Showcasing Anish Kapoor’s rarely seen pigment sculptures from the 1970s and 1980s, the exhibition “Early Works” marks the first U.S. museum presentation devoted entirely to the artist’s formative years. This revelatory exhibition brings together Kapoor’s striking pigment sculptures, alongside works on paper and sketchbooks, to illuminate the experimental fervor of a young artist who would go on to redefine the language of contemporary sculpture.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Jewish Museum Archive

Born in Mumbai in 1954, Kapoor’s journey as an artist has been one of cultural and conceptual exploration. After spending time in Israel in the early 1970s, he moved to England to study art, entering a fertile creative scene that was embracing Minimalism and Conceptualism. His first solo exhibition in 1980 signaled the arrival of a bold new voice—one whose sculptural idiom was both deeply sensual and rigorously formal. The “Early Works” exhibition traces the genesis of this distinctive voice through approximately 55 works, including a selection of recent sculptures that bridge his early investigations with his ongoing explorations of perception, materiality, and form. At the heart of the exhibition are Kapoor’s pigment sculptures—richly hued, enigmatic forms that both seduce and unsettle. Grouped in evocative constellations, these works combine pristine geometry with the delicacy of loose pigment that spills and drifts across floors and walls. Their surfaces seem to hover between solidity and dissolution, creating a sense of objects perpetually in flux. The tension between clarity and instability, between presence and disappearance, is central to Kapoor’s practice and remains a touchstone throughout his career. The exhibition also considers how the perceptual and formal concerns of these early sculptures resonate with Kapoor’s later work, including his recent experiments with Vantablack—a nanotechnological material that absorbs nearly all light. Presented together, these early and recent works underscore Kapoor’s enduring fascination with the psychic effects of color and the uncanny allure of objects that appear to defy material reality. In both pigment and darkness, Kapoor’s sculptures seem to open portals into voids—spaces where matter and spirit, presence and absence, converge. Complementing the sculptures is a selection of early drawings and gouaches, intimate works that reveal a more gestural and surreal side of the artist. These pieces, with their irregular forms and fluid gestures, offer a counterpoint to the austere precision of his sculptures, reintroducing the trace of the artist’s hand and thought process. For American audiences, these early works will come as a revelation. They reveal a Kapoor still in the process of finding his voice—an artist probing the boundaries of color, form, and perception with curiosity and daring. Yet even in these first experiments, the seeds of his later monumental installations are unmistakable. A keen sensitivity to how objects inhabit and transform space already points toward his future environmental works on a much larger scale. “Early Works” offers not just a rare glimpse into the formative years of one of the world’s most influential artists, but also a meditation on the enduring mysteries of perception and presence that continue to define Anish Kapoor’s art.

Photo: Anish Kapoor, Part of the Red, 1981, mixed media, pigment, 28.3 × 118.1 × 157.5 in. (72 × 300 × 400 cm). Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands. © Anish Kapoor. All Rights Reserved, DACS, London/ ARS, NY 2025

Info: Curators: Darsie Alexander and Shira Backer, The Jewish Museum, 1109 5th Ave at 92nd St., New York, NY, USA, Duration: 24/10/2025-1/2/2026, Days & Hours: Mon & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-20:00, https://thejewishmuseum.org/